Trip Log: 2684 nautical miles. 946 nautical miles to go

5 small flying fish on deck today. Wet ass, no fish.

Yesterday continued with strong winds and squalls. The squalls cleared overnight, but the wind remained at 25-30 knots. Right around 30 knots, the banshees start screaming in the rigging. The swells rise up from astern, the wind gusts, there's the sound of rushing, breaking waves in the dark and then a sudden wild, screaming wail as the wind peaks. The wail is continuous above 35 knots.

The helmsman is bundled up in a wet weather jacket, even when there is no rain. When it clears up, it's cooler with the higher winds. When there's rain, the splashboards are in and the hatch is closed. The off-watch crew is below, trying to sleep but being jerked around every which way. We've now set things up in the saloon where one person can jam in amongst two big sail bags and a bunch of pillows. This is almost the only way to stabilize things enough to sleep.

A book we have on board, "Tropical Cruising Handbook", as this to say:

"Downwind Sailing. There's no better way to rack up the miles than catching a good trade wind breeze. But sailing in the trades is not always the most comfortable and can be quite hard on gear. It's not uncommon for swells and seas to hit from different directions. Each boat reacts differently, but sudden sharp lurches and rolls are typical. When things really get cooking, the result can be a free roller-coaster ride, but with the drawback that you can't get off."

Things are, indeed, cooking! We surf down the biggest swells, reaching breakneck speeds of around 10 knots, then lurching sideways when a cross sea catches us the wrong way near the bottom. That shoves the bow around and we heel well over, sometimes scooping water into the cockpit as the helmsman gets a dousing. Quite thrilling in the dark, as you wrestle to bring the boat back on course, then overshoot the other way.

In the middle of a torrential downpour yesterday afternoon, Sal yelled out from below, "What's that beeping from the nav station". When we left the coastal area, I had set the AIS alarm to go off if there was a ship within 20 miles. A quick glance at the display showed a ship right on top of us. However, the display was set so that edge to edge was 2048 miles! After zooming in, we could see that the ship, the So Yang, was 20 miles off. It was 106 meters long, 15 meters beam, and traveling on an intercept course at 2.5 knots. What? Ships that size are usually doing a minimum of 20 knots. There was no way to see it in the rain, and as time went on, it changed direction several times. We concluded it was a very large fishing boat. Some bursts of what sounded like Chinese on the VHF radio probably meant it was a huge purse seiner communicating with its dory (the boat that takes out the end of the net).

Tane plays his guitar regularly. It has steel strings, which rust extremely rapidly, so yesterday he replaced all of them. Fresh fodder for the rust demons.

Our email goes through the SSB radio, using SailMail. This is the email system we use for updating this blog. Each time we go to send and receive email, we check the propagation --- the signal quality and strength to and from the various sailmail stations that are available. When we left Puerto Lucia, the best quality was with two stations in Panama. The next closest station was in Corpus Christi, Texas. Chile was quite a way down the list. It's interesting to see how things are changing as we move further west. The current list, in order of propagation quality, is:

Manihi (Tuamotos) San Diego Panama Panama-2 Corpus Christi San Luis Obispo Honolulu Palo Alto Niue Chile Daytona Friday Harbor (Washington state) Rock Hill (South Carolina) Trinidad Lunenburg NS Firefly (NSW - Australia) Belgium Brunei Africa Red Sea

As I write this, Tane is asleep in the saloon berth, and Sal is bundled up at the helm, a squall has just passed over and as the rain stopped, the winds dropped back to 20 knots. From inside the cabin, I can hear the wind in the rigging, the rippling, rushing, slapping, burbling sound of the water rushing past, and an assortment of squeaks, groans, clunks, clicks and other protests from various parts of the boat.